James Cameron: Titanic (1997)
Titanic is a movie about time travel. That’s right, James Cameron, the director of two of the most famous science-fiction films about time travel, made another movie, a historical epic romance and disaster picture, that is also about bridging the past and the present—or the present and the future, depending on how you want to look at things. As Anders noted in his review of The Terminator, that picture’s elegant narrative paradoxes are some of the most intelligent ever put on film. Aren, in his studied analysis of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, argues that Cameron wanted to undo the grim fatalism of the first film and instead offer a time travel moral fable about the potential of one boy, John Connor—as well as society at large—to change their future. Titanic paradoxically combines the grim fatalism of the first Terminator with the hope in humanity of the second. While Titanic is not Cameron’s most perfect film, it is a gargantuan summation of the breadth and depth of his cinematic craftsmanship as well as his thematic obsessions.
Like all time travel movies, Titanic is also about technology. With Titanic, Cameron wrote his first work based on history rather than fiction (and in most cases, speculative fiction). For this period piece, Cameron selected as his subject one of humankind’s most impressive technological feats—what was at the time the largest ship ever built—but one that would become, infamously, one of our most spectacular failures.
Like so many previous Cameron pictures, Titanic presents the dichotomous potential of technology. Time travel in the Terminator movies is a tool for assassination as well as salvation. In The Abyss, nuclear weapons threaten our existence, while new advancements in diving gear allow a man to reach new depths beneath the sea, and thereby prevent our destruction. Humankind’s technological hubris can result in incredible destruction, the loss of thousands of lives with the sinking of the “unsinkable” ship. But it can also recover and connect what was previously lost: not only an incredibly valuable diamond necklace, the “Heart of the Ocean,” but also, in an almost real way—or potentially actually real way—the invaluable connection we have with other human beings. Thus, in Cameron’s imaginative universe, technology can potentially enable spiritual interconnectivity between human beings—or, in the case of Avatar, between different rational species.
At this point this review risks blasting off into the realm of abstraction and speculative philosophy, and probably alienating more than a few of you readers. So let’s ground things—or, to borrow the language of Cameron’s obsession with water—let’s return to the surface.
All of what I’ve just talked about is on display in the frame narrative that Cameron uses for Titanic, which is his first complete narrative frame device. This frame narrative, which is far from superfluous, rather contains the heart of the film. In it, Bill Paxton plays sea explorer and treasure hunter, Brock Lovett, who is something of a stand-in for Cameron himself, as Paxton’s presence in a real Cameron under-the-sea doc a few years later, Ghost of the Abyss (2003), makes clear. Lovett wants to recover a priceless jeweled necklace, the Heart of the Ocean, from the wreck of the famed vessel, which eventually leads an old lady who sees reports about the explorer’s activities on the TV news to actually journey by helicopter out to his exploration ship drifting above the sunken Titanic. Note how transportation and communication technology has enabled each of these initial steps in the narrative.
Famously, both the first and the second Terminator movies begin in the future, but they move into the past and end with ambiguity about what will happen in the future. Titanic parallels this movement to begin with. But here we get not a destructive robot assassin, or a violent robot defender, but a peaceful helper robot explorer. Remember the robot probe that scans the smoky interior of Ripley’s escape pod, which I noted in my review of Aliens? Similarly, the watery pseudopod in The Abyss is a probe used by that film’s NTIs, who are exploring upwards from their home at the furthest bottom of the ocean.
Robots going into the wreck of a ship. Explorers looking for treasure. An old lady with a clue. And then she begins to tell her story, and she, and the audience, journey back in time. This is the stuff of boy’s adventures, but it is also the hidden treasure of one old lady’s life, her cherished memory. Is the film a memory, or is it memory and more? As the older Rose reveals, she was on the Titanic, and was one of the few to survive. Then the film slips beneath the waves…
In the years before it was released, Titanic was Cameron’s much derided follow-up to his enviable (and perhaps unmatched) earlier run of action movie hits. Commentators and members of the public in the mid-90s were questioning Cameron’s move from robot and alien action and suspense to a romance featuring two young actors, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. For Cameron, it was a relatively new project for him, rather than, for example, a story he had written years before and always wanted to make, as with The Abyss. The idea only came to Cameron in 1992 after viewing A Night to Remember (1958) and then seeing the documentary Titanic: Treasure of the Deep (1992). So, Titanic wasn't really a life-long interest, but he comes to the subject through his obsessions, such as with technology, robot submersibles, etc. Looking back at Titanic from the distance of 25 years, however, the actual storyline and subject matter fit in quite well with Cameron’s obsessions: technology, water, action-suspense, time.
Time. Titanic is haunted by time. Part of this is the incredible and potent dramatic irony which has soaked into every frame of the film, that separation between what the characters know and what we know, between the events of the past and our perspective, looking back. Perhaps more so than any film before or after, every member of the audience knows how this film is going to end before they ever watch it: the big ship is going to sink.
This creates an incredible sense of doom and powerful eventual catharsis, which is likely part of the reason, I would argue, beyond teen hormones and the late 90s cult of young Leo, why the film had such an incredible emotional impact on countless viewers during its storied theatrical run. The way that 1973’s The Exorcist filled headlines with people’s emotional reactions, fainting and screaming, or the way that 1977’s Star Wars wowed people with its thrilling special effects, sending everyone into the light of reality glowing from the novel experience, Titanic built up and maintained its long, long theatrical run through word of mouth. Had you seen Titanic? You had to see it. People were crying. Girls were hysterical. You had to see Titanic. Young girls with their moms, couples on dates, were going once, twice, six times.
Part of the appeal was the star-crossed romance and the charismatic casting, but the fatalism of knowing what would happen enhances the effect of their romantic tragedy. There are previous Titanic movies, such as the aforementioned British drama, A Night to Remember, as well the American comedy musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964) (whom Kathy Bates plays in Cameron’s movie), but I’ve actually never seen any of them.
Nevertheless, I would argue that the most famous and successful cinematic precedent for a doomed romance set during a famous historical disaster would be Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953). It’s a big Hollywood movie following a handful of men (Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Frank Sinatra) and women (Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed) with various troubles and romantic struggles, and it is set at the naval base at Pearl Harbor, just before December 7, 1941, the day that would live in infamy. (We’ve noted in our Roundtable, and Anders also did in his review of True Lies, the many points of connection between Cameron and Michael Bay. It’s interesting that Bay would try to duplicate, however unsuccessfully, Titanic’s combination of tragic romance and epic disaster with another Pearl Harbor movie, 2001’s Pearl Harbor.) Like Titanic, From Here to Eternity is tinged throughout with a romantic fatalism and an overwhelming sense of tragedy. All that comes before, in both movies, is seen in the light of what we know will eventually happen. Both films would seem to draw on Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, which lays out the fate of its star-crossed lovers in the play’s Prologue. In all these cases, the audience is knowingly following the characters to their inevitable tragedy.
The movie’s effect on people during its original theatrical run was a genuine cultural, and global, phenomenon, worthy of study in its own right. For instance, it’s been noted how youth growing up in the more emotionally repressive culture of Japan really resonated to the Edwardian story of a young woman learning to live her life her way, and taking a chance on a young, charming, and seize-the-day rascal, DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson. It was the highest grossing film in Japan until 2001’s Spirited Away.
Jack Dawson. Dawson suggets Dawson City of the Yukon Gold Rush. We aren’t surprised that this young tramp has a heart of gold. We also shouldn’t be surprised that Jack hails from “Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.” Who else comes from a Chippawa near a falls? Perhaps Bill Paxton isn’t the only stand-in.
We meet DiCaprio’s Jack at a game of poker, so I might as well put my cards on the table. I was a boy in early adolescence when Titanic came out. I didn’t see it in theatres. Crazy, I know. Can you believe it? I probably resented all the girls in upper elementary school having Leo posters in their lockers. As a Star Wars nerd, I also came to resent that Titanic was the new biggest movie of all time. I mean, come on, it doesn’t even have big space battles or alien creatures! These aren’t impressive special effects! Just a CGI ship and wisps coming from people’s mouths in the cold night air. I didn’t see the movie until a few years later, on home video, and I thought it was okay, considering the romance to be clichéd and cheesy, but liking the disaster movie second half. In the years since, I’ve come to appreciate DiCaprio as an actor (even totally reversing my youthful position on Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, but that’s a story for another time) and to very much like Kate Winslet in a number of roles, but I had not revisited Cameron’s Titanic until several weeks ago.
I finished my rewatch confirming that the movie is one hell of a ride, an intense emotional experience that reaches people on many different emotional levels. This is one long movie that has to be watched in one sitting to generate the proper effect. We have to appreciate the slow build, with Jack and Rose meeting and developing a relationship and the careful hints that all is not well with the ship and the crew, in order to be properly prepared for the relentless series of events that happen on the fateful night. Iceberg! Once the ship hits, you can’t bail. As viewers, we ride the ship all the way down into the icy waters, but only after being thrown about and wrung out. The film is an exercise in building and releasing tension that should be mentioned alongside works of Hitchcock and Spielberg, or Cameron’s own works, such as Aliens.
But the movie isn’t entirely what is remembered in the popular consciousness. Titanic is not just a teen romance set on the Titanic. Nor is it a disaster movie with one romantic plotline for the main characters. The conventional romance plot, with all its usual features, runs about an hour and a half. The whole picture hinges on the iceberg, however, and after that crash the film tips into disaster mode, focusing on the slow yet relentless sinking of the ship and how it impacts the two young lovers as well as the rest of the crew and passengers. The sinking tinges Jack and Rose’s romance with a different atmosphere, almost a heightened reality.
While the romance plot before the ship sinks could almost be its own self-contained movie, I was struck by how this is also a movie about class and social divisions, about the end of an older way of life, and about what moments, and movies, of life can mean after time has passed, a theme I will discuss more below. For now, it’s worth mentioning that the social critique in the background early on plays out in the disaster as well. Who gets to go aboard the lifeboats? Who is trapped in the lower decks?
I’ve noted before in this retrospective that Cameron can tell a damn fine clear story, but that his movies are also often marked by a limited number of scenes or sequences. He never assembles sequences mixing up times and locations into a montage that achieves a new union or coherence, as Christopher Nolan does frequently in his films. Cameron’s intercutting is classical. Apart from the frame narrative, Titanic is also not only bound by location but also largely by time. Most of the movie takes place on the night of the sinking. This allows the sinking to be played out with an incredible meticulousness, and the detailed and anguished attention to the different features makes the sinking all the more painful to experience.
As a disaster movie, it differs from most in that, while it has a strong cast of supporting characters, it is a movie about Jack and Rose, not an ensemble drama. Sure, we meet many other characters, such as the ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber), White Star Line’s director, J. Bruce Ismay (Jonathan Hyde), Captain Edward John Smith (Bernard Hill), and the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), but it’s Jack and Rose’s story.
Cameron’s attention to the action and suspense of his disaster romance recalls the big disaster movies of the 1970s, such as The Towering Inferno (1974) and, most notably, The Poseidon Adventure (1972), about an ocean liner being flipped over by a tidal wave. Cameron came of age as a filmmaker in the 1970s, and while he borrowed from Spielberg’s Jaws for Piranha II, I suspect he also kept some idea of the The Poseidon Adventure in his mind for later use.
As the ship sinks, Rose has to descend into the ship’s lower decks in order to rescue Jack, who has been arrested and detained down below, as the waters continue to rise, engulfing rooms and hallways and whole decks. The sequence is a feminist inversion of the usual damsel in distress (and note that Rose does not need to become “badass” in order to act heroically—Rose hasn’t secretly been training to be a perfect diver, or some such 2020s nonsense). Once again, Cameron’s approach to gender contains elements of feminism.
But the sequence is also notable for how it focuses on one extended action sequence in the midst of the larger disaster, while people line up for lifeboats, etc. Cameron suspends the larger narrative concerns for us to witness the hero and heroine simply achieving a particular goal: his rescue and their escape. It makes more sense emotionally than narratively, to raise the stakes of rescuing Jack only to have him sacrifice himself at the end.
Titanic is a picture notable for its incredible practical effects and momentous production; Cameron rebuilt the ship, with details accurate down to the markings on the china. But I appreciate this sequence in particular, with the water in the hallways rising on a scale that few films could afford, and few filmmakers would attempt. It’s also an interesting example of what is essentially a 1970s disaster movie sequence, much akin to scenes in The Poseidon Adventure, in a movie that at other points has a scale, and certainly an elegance and effect, to equal the other disaster movies of the 1990s. Some of the CGI shows its age, mostly when the boat sails in the sun in full daylight, but the nighttime shots hold up well and the overall effect of the boat and the decks filling with water is stunning. We get amazing, harrowing visuals, such as the stern of the ship raised up in the air, or the hundreds of frozen bodies in the water.
Of course, we also have to place Titanic in the context of the 1990s, when it was made. The 90s were another decade dominated by disaster movies. While disaster movies in the 1970s drew on the anxieties about social breakdown of that decade, those of the 1990s seemed to offer fantasies of destruction amidst the relative placidity of the North American 1990s life. There were dinosaurs taking over theme parks: 1993’s Jurassic Park and 1997’s The Lost World. Alien invasions, with Independence Day in 1996. There were asteroid movies, such as 1998’s Deep Impact and Armageddon (in another point of connection between Cameron and Bay, where Bay is trying to channel Cameron’s romanticism). Titanic came in the midst of this series of disaster films, and it should be remembered, in part, as the principal 1990s disaster movie, even as its historicism and romance sets it tonally apart from those more silly, outrageous, and fantastical stories (the genre would reach a new level of absurdity in the early 2000s, with Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow and later on, 2012).
How evocative and terrifying is the sequence when the whole ship tilts over before plunging down into the icy waters? Jack tells Rose to hold on, and he’s also telling the audience, in what is easily just as much a theme park thrill ride sequence, in spite of the gravity and scale of the coming deaths, as anything in a Spielberg film. This is a highly effective movie, and it’s entertaining as well as emotional.
I won’t spend much time here describing all the details of the film’s historical obsessions with why the Titanic sank. Failed leadership shows up in most of Cameron’s movies, as with characters choosing money and fame over competency and sensibleness. There’s the damned foolish risk of not having the right amount of lifeboats. There’s the technological hubris—characters always saying this boat cannot sink. These are all themes Cameron has explored before. Narratively, he sets up the issues with the boat as foreshadowing. The narrative approach is not subtle but it is effective, our constant fear and frustration being heightened by these constant reminders that things could have gone differently, but didn’t. These themes about failed leadership and hubris are also common to many disaster movies.
What I’m also intrigued by is how Cameron’s filmmaking production here begins to parallel what he is depicting on screen, but by going in an opposite course, towards success rather than failure. Cameron was going to make the biggest movie, and everyone thought it would sink. The achievement required both leadership and the crews’ technological accomplishments holding up. And the mammoth success and achievement of Titanic the movie actually testifies to what people and technology can accomplish, while at the same time it calls attention to the achievements (not without flaws, of course) of that big old ship. The production history informs and shapes the themes, as it does in other Cameron movies, particularly their approach to technology. As Cameron notes in his underwater documentaries, shooting at the bottom of the sea can result in death if there is just one mistake. But the story of his Titanic movie goes in the opposite direction of the narrative subject, not towards unforeseen failure but towards unforeseen triumph. The film’s accomplishments extend beyond Cameron himself however.
Kate Winslet’s Rose DeWitt Bukater is a good character, but she models aspects of the sort of early 20th century New Woman in an almost caricatured fashion. She likes new art, like “this strange fellow Picasso.” She is a feminist of this period, although those inclinations are suppressed to the point of suicidal depression at the start, such as in the scene with Rose and Jack’s meeting at the back of the ship, when she contemplates jumping off. In The Awakening, Kate Chopin’s seminal feminist novella, first published in 1899, the heroine eventually drowns herself to escape the confined life she cannot bear to live. So Rose trying to kill herself because she doesn’t want to get married is enacting a feminist trope of the period the film is set during.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack is better than I remembered, and I can see the appeal he had at the time, but the character is also something of a cipher and an enigma, reflecting to Rose almost whatever it is she is truly desiring. With no family ties and a mysterious background, is he even real? With DiCaprio’s then-boyish face, Jack is like a Peter Pan, beckoning her out the window, more than a convincing manly lover. He’s not here to rescue or take care of her, but rather to enliven that which is already within her. Mothers would admire DiCaprio’s beautiful face, but part of the appeal had to be imagining back into their own pasts. What if I had met a boy like that? It’s also important that Jack is not the lover who becomes a husband. He remains an amazing memory, a dream of what could have been.
All that said, in spite of the charisma and attractiveness of the lead actors, I come away from the movie thinking that they remain conventional and clichéd. Neither does or says anything that is surprising or even very interesting. But Cameron’s achievement here is that they are so conventional because he’s actually going for something archetypal. In a sense, they are archetypes of star-crossed lovers in an early 20th-century setting, the class divisions that further their divide and their emotional characteristics being sort of updates (for 1912) of Romeo and Juliet. (Remember that Leo had just played Romeo the year before.)
Billy Zane and others of the supporting cast deserve credit too. Zane plays the terrible fiancé to Rose, Caledon Hockley. It takes the right actor to convey the kind of asshole who we can totally despise, and yet we still believe that characters in his world admire him, whether willfully blind to his worst tendencies or not. Zane is also handsome enough (Zane never got his star turn after 1996’s The Phantom) to foil Leo, who is much more boyish at this stage. There is a sense that the physical and age difference between Hockley and Jack underscores Jack’s appeal to Rose: Jack liberates Rose. It’s less about Jack and more about Rose.
The social divide of the film is literalized, as it would have been in real-life, into the deck divisions. The upper classes enjoyed the top decks, and the lower decks were for cheap tickets and immigrants, etc. We see this in the contrasted party scenes as well as in scenes of working the ship, while those above simply enjoy the pleasures of life.
At a few different points, we see the mechanical decks of the ship, vast stretches of enormous pistons and fiery furnaces, and I couldn’t help but think that Cameron, with his knowledge of science fiction, is, while achieving historical accuracy, also channeling images of Metropolis (1927), that godfather of all screen science fiction. In Titanic, the worker inferno propels the whole city-on-the-water. Recall that Metropolis is about a city that is hierarchically divided as well as physically stratified, with the lower regions being where the workers work and the high up reaches being where the rich live and wealthy youth enjoy their Gardens of Pleasure.
Titanic is portrayed as a microcosm (if one can call the biggest ship ever “micro”) of society at large, but as in Metropolis, and as it actually was in ocean liners at the time, the divisions are physical as well as social. This is most notably portrayed in Titanic when lower decks are locked up, while the waters rise. Recall, the flooding waters of Metropolis, and the workers trying to escape upwards to safety. In that science fiction classic, the Heart has to mediate between the Head and the Hands, as its message proclaims. With the jewel being called the Heart of the Ocean, Cameron is willing to engage his own story on an equally symbolic level. These visual and narrative connections are a good example of how Titanic is not always what it is commonly remembered.
In an especially haunting sequence, in which various characters are coming to grips with their inevitable deaths as the ship sinks, we see an old couple come close on their bed as the waters rise, a poor mother talk about Tír na nÓg, the mythical Celtic underworld, to her two children to calm them, and a priest quote scripture and conduct prayers with a kneeling group as the stern of the ship lifts up:
He shall wipe every tear from their eyes. And there shall be no more death or mourning, crying out or pain, for the former world has passed away.
Father Byles (James Lancaster) is quoting Revelation 21:4. Now, as far as I can tell, Cameron has taken, or made, an unusual translation of the final line of the bible verse. I can’t find a translation that uses “world.” Most English translations say that the “former things” or “first things” have passed away, not the “former world.” The significance of that slight change (or translation selection) speaks to both the film’s themes as well as its place in film history. The priest says this as his flock stands over a literal precipice opening up before them, as the ship tilts before plunging below. The lines hold a double meaning for this film. This is very much a movie about the modern world being born. That is there in the film’s technological concerns with building a ship that couldn’t sink, with social class changes, with changing gender relations, and with changing what marriage is about. It is no small thing that some have thought of the Titanic’s sinking in 1912 as marking an end of the Old World, just a few years before the First World War totally shattered it.
But, looking at Titanic after 25 years, it also is about the old classical Hollywood being finished. In some ways, Titanic is the last giant Hollywood epic in the classical mode, the last film of a piece with Gone with the Wind, not only in its shot construction but also its desire to parallel a romance plot alongside another larger-scale epic plot, which are then resolved together. Titanic plays with these conventions, but we’ve noted Cameron’s classicism before: his interest in shot and narrative clarity, and in creating a clear sense of spatial awareness, as well as his emotionalism. He wants to move and entertain his audience, and few films have done this so intensely, even in a storied career, as Titanic.
Titanic capstones the 90s, not only their disaster movies but also their cinema. Afterwards, franchise world and other new developments begin, with The Matrix and The Phantom Menace in 1999; with Gladiator in 2000, which stylistically and thematically alters the steady technicolour and Christian pietism of earlier Hollywood sword-and-sandal epics; with the fantasy franchises The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc, etc. When was the last big movie that was just what it was, and not going to be anything more? The film’s very story, the sinking ship, means that it could not have generated a sequel.
Most of the big movies of the 2000s are either pitched towards children (and the parents who have to bring them), the whole family, or are tinged with darkness, such as Nolan’s Batman films. Titanic is a grim story about the spectacular sinking of a giant ship and the deaths of countless souls, but it’s interested in the tears that can be wrung from that concept, not the grim mood. Again, this is largely absent from most movies of the 2000s, barring aspects of The Return of the King (2003) and Cameron’s own Avatar (2009). The emotionalism of Titanic is distinct from the distant irony and sarcasm of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
When Father Byles says the “former world has passed away” this also signifies, when we watch the film today, how this kind of movie is no longer the norm. This theme of the movie, Old and New, also points to the film’s place in film history. It’s pure classical Hollywood, and in our perspective of 25 years, it looks less like a forward-looking film than a look back, a culmination. Titanic caps off a previous tradition, while its technological achievements point forward.
In our recent Roundtable on the first half of James Cameron’s career as a filmmaker, I noted that time travel, for Cameron, is about joining together things that could not normally exist through technology. On the positive end of things, Cameron sees technology as a bridge between the incompatible.
Technology also bridges what is beneath with what is above. This is meant both literally and figuratively in this film. Submersibles carry the explorers and their robots from the surface to the bottom of the sea. The setting of the Titanic brings the characters from different social classes, and physical decks, together. Technology, a newly invented car, enables their love making, in that famous image of their intensity making the interior windows steam up. Again, technology can facilitate connection.
And it is video technology, actually shot underwater for this film, that at first allows Rose to be aware of the exploration, then to see it almost first hand, from the real exploration vessel, the Keldysh (which Cameron sailed for all of his real diving expeditions) above the sunken fabled ship. In what sense does cinema itself bridge the divide for Cameron? Is Cameron saying that movies, both documentary and fictional, can connect us with other people and other times on a profound, almost real, level?
“Meet me at the clock, Rose.” Jack had said that line earlier in the movie, before their romance really takes off, but it’s most clearly signalled at the end. The film itself is Cameron’s effort to “bring the Titanic back to the surface” and return it to its former glory, while also honouring the people who died. Notice that the last images we see of the great ship are in its perfection, before its literal fall into the ocean depths, and we get Rose and Jack at the clock. Earlier in the film, Paxton’s explorer asks Rose, “Are you ready to go back to Titanic?”
What are we to make of this ending? Is this, in Rose’s final moments, a fleeting memory that passes through her still-living mind, before she expires to nothingness? Is this her being reunited in some sort of heavenly place, in which we see those whom we loved and lost? Is this Rose journeying back in time, to the Titanic, not to live it again in a fatalistic death spiral, but to change course and live forever? Note that the final shot is from Rose’s point of view. We and Rose are linked together, and the audience in a way relives those events each time the movie is played. What were the audiences doing when going back to see this film again and again? Were they not mirroring Rose, who returns to events of the Titanic, to embrace its lost glory, to feel what those people felt? The film itself freezes the ship and Rose and Jack together, and on the screen that forever is achieved, before the black credits roll.
9 out of 10
Titanic (1997, USA)
Written and directed by James Cameron; starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Victor Garber, Jonathan Hyde, Bernard Hill, James Lancaster.
This horror thriller from Rowdy Herrington, the director of Road House, plays as an effective, Brian De Palma-esque work.